


Kairos

by thatbluenote



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Art History, Cambridge, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, gratuitous use of greek myths, implied minor character death, implied offscreen sexual assault, implied offscreen sexual violence, implied violence against an animal, not a university au technically, pre-canon if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-19
Updated: 2018-11-21
Packaged: 2019-08-26 04:54:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16674883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatbluenote/pseuds/thatbluenote
Summary: Will, a psychology doctoral student at Cambridge University, takes a gig as a figure model for Professor Lecter's classics course on Greek sculpture.





	1. The Farnese Hercules

**Author's Note:**

> Kairos (n.): The perfect, delicate, crucial moment in time; opportunity; fleeting rightness for word or action.
> 
> “Soon will I rouse you to yet wilder dancing and pipe a note of terror in your ear.”  
> -Lyssa, Goddess of Fury, Tragedy of Herakles, Euripides (trans. Vellacott)

* * *

##  Kairos

  
_ Kairos (n.): The perfect, delicate, crucial moment in time; opportunity; fleeting rightness for word or action _ .

 

“ [ Soon will I rouse you to yet wilder dancing and pipe a note of terror in your ear ](http://www.theoi.com/Daimon/Lyssa.html) .”

-Lyssa, Goddess of Fury,  _ Tragedy of Herakles _ , Euripides (trans. Vellacott)

 

* * *

 

**One: The Farnese Hercules**

 

_ Seeking model for live figure drawing for Art & Archaeology supervisions of The Hellenistic Form, Dr H. Lecter, Th. 1-4, ongoing. Athletic type preferred. Enquire at Faculty of Classics main office. Stipend offered _ . Will clutched the creased and wrinkled flyer in his hand and shivered in the brisk, wet November wind. 

He rarely came to this part of the campus. The rain-slick cobbles of the Silver Street bridge on his way over had seemed as much a warning as the empty streets. No one else wanted to be out and about on such a miserable afternoon. But the flyer had lingered in the pocket of his threadbare jacket for three days, tempting him with its promise of much-needed pocket money. Its promise, perhaps, of escape.

Fleeing the chill and the rain, Will pushed open the door to the Faculty of Classics building.

The young admin did not spare him a second look when he mentioned the advertisement, merely handed over some forms to fill out. He sat quietly and bent over the clipboard for some minutes, filling out the paperwork, while she rang the faculty member in charge of student hires. 

The professor who came out to sign off at the bottom of Will’s paperwork, a cheerful, tall man with a faint Australian accent who introduced himself as the Regius Professor, gave Will a brief look after glancing over his cramped handwritten form. “Do you think you can manage three hours at a go? The last one skived off after his first month or so, said it gave him muscle cramps.” Dr. Hunter’s smile was disarming, all ruddy cheeks and eyes crinkling up with amusement.

“I have done some figure modeling before.”

“Interesting...and you’re an American? Well, isn’t that...hmm. I think you’ll find Dr. Lecter perfectly fine to work with.” At the sudden, silent look from the young woman at the desk, Dr. Hunter cleared his throat politely and said in a firm voice, “I am sure, being new to the Faculty of Classics yourself, you will disregard any unfortunate gossip you may hear about him. He is a visiting scholar and an honored guest of the university.”

“I read his recent article, actually. ‘On  _ Techne _ and  _ Arete _ ’? It was...interesting.” At the professor’s look of surprise, Will hastily added, “I admit I may have heard something of him...around town.” Not saying,  _ from my flatmate’s mentally unstable ex-girlfriend _ . “I just wanted to know more about his research before I applied for the position. Sir.”

The man paused and gave Will a closer look, eyes narrowed as if to gauge whether he was poking fun, before breaking out into a wide smile again. He looked back down at the paperwork in his hand. “I see. And you are a Psychology doc student, Emmanuel College...and it says here you’re a rower?” Will nodded and tried not to feel too conspicuous in his own clothing as the professor looked at his shoulders and arms with vague interest. “Oh, he’ll like you,” was the man’s only comment, and he shook Will’s hand with vigor. 

Will set out down the sidewalk toward home with the schedule in his pocket, already feeling a bit warmer against the gusting wind that pulled at his collar. Thursdays from one to four he would pose for a room full of classics students. And for the visiting professor with the interesting reputation. Dr. Lecter seemed like mere background noise in the whole deal, however. This would be three hours, he thought to himself with relief, in which he could sink into the silence of his own mind, not moving, not talking, not responding to anyone. Figure modeling was not easy, but it was bliss for Will. Silent, unthinking, unfeeling bliss.

He would need those three hours, he knew, to counterbalance everything from Dr. Chilton’s  _ Advanced Abnormalities in Psychopathology _ supervisions, which had lately become so intense Will had found himself suffering certain consequences more and more often. 

In his first term, he had joined the boating club in an attempt to balance out the sheer number of hours spent in the MacCurdy Psychopathology Library. In the predawn chill, he jogged to the boathouse and spent hours in a one-man scull along the silent, fogged stretches of the river. It had built his muscles and kept his blood warm, yet in the end, it had not been enough. 

As a younger student, he had used his single-mindedness to his advantage; now it seemed to range out of his control. Instead of focus, his research took on a discomforting intensity, occupying his thoughts at all hours. The price of his continued studies seemed to be this all-encompassing absorption: each case study became a door through which he gazed, poised for the crossing, and sometimes stumbled.

Years before, as a broke undergraduate, he had modeled for a life drawing class on a dare and found that it afforded him a mental break. To hold still, even nude, a stranger among strangers, emptied his mind.

Desperate to get back to that place again, Will did not care whether the gossip about Lecter was true. This job would be Will’s saving. He could close his mind to everything else, he told himself, just for those few hours.

 

Deserted, the room seemed cavernous when Will entered. Easels stood at intervals throughout the space, all facing a low platform in the center. He walked toward it.

Gray, diffuse light spilled down from high windows. He stood under the cascading light, struck by its intensity.

His upturned hands shone a little against the dull background of the room as he considered the light. His skin illuminated by pale and blank light. Divine.

But that wasn’t his own feeling, was it?

No.  _ Draw a line, carefully now.  _ It played over the lines of Will’s palm as he tried to remember. That divine light belonged more to Chilton’s talk earlier that week on Jerusalem Syndrome. 

_ A rare, some say false psychosis, characterized by its trigger: a visit to a holy city where the patient feels compelled to enact a divine or messianic mission _ .

That divine light belonged to Chilton’s case study.  _ At intake, the patient, a Frenchman of Jewish descent in his early thirties, presented with a mutilated eye and bloodied fingers, in addition to disordered thought and garbled speech. His injuries were revealed to be the result of clawing at the stones of the Wailing Wall for hours, perhaps longer, and he had gouged out his own eye upon arrival in the city because ‘God instructs or ordains me’ as he said. ‘Dieu m’ordonne’. He had been fired from a janitorial position at a hospital for behavioral disturbances that were thought to be related to alcoholism, but he was later linked to an unsolved string of corpse mutilations in the morgue—the eyes had been removed. He said he had been told to seek the eye of God inside the Wailing Wall itself... _

Cambridge has its own gods, Will mused idly as he flickered his hands in and out of the light in the art studio. He wondered about the Frenchman’s psychosis. How did divinity feel? Sudden like lightning, or slow like a tide, seeping into you so you don’t notice until you have your own eye in your palm?

Intense and merciless the light poured down. He looked up to gauge its source. The wide skylight above him revealed only the featureless, gray cloud cover.  _ As if recently vacated _ , came the disturbing thought. The notion left him uneasy. 

“Looking for something?” An unfamiliar, softly accented voice spoke in the echoing, empty room.

Will blinked to dispel the light’s glare and turned to see a man watching him silently from amid the shadows of the doorway. Professor Lecter stood just in the studio, his suit a dark navy shot through with a narrow dove-grey plaid. Will saw the man’s gaze, like his question, was not entirely casual. Unsettled, Will tried to return to himself, but he felt the Jerusalem case study like an itch still firing along his nerves.

“No, I was...I’m sorry, Professor. I didn’t hear you come in. I apologize, I’m a little early.”

“Are you?” Lecter stepped into the room, his voice amused, dry yet soft. Neither the brusque, tedious scholar nor the glad-handing Oxbridge snob: an altogether refined man, his eyes like warm cognac and ambiguous with reserved judgment as he looked Will up and down. An evaluation, an appraisal.

Will stood straighter and brushed his dark hair back nervously. “I’m your—I’m the figure model. I’m Will Graham.”

“Indeed,” the man said, and now his mouth broadened ever so slightly into a smile, though it did not entirely warm his expression. “I am Dr. Lecter.” He held his hand out. “Welcome, Mr. Graham.” When they shook, Lecter’s hand felt broad and smooth, firmly clasping Will’s for only a second before he looked down at Will’s hand with an interested expression. “Those are some impressive calluses.” 

“I’m a rower,” Will said.

“I know,” Lecter said, not looking up as he set his satchel on the podium and busied himself taking out some lecture notes. At this moment, students began to arrive and Will suddenly felt awkward and out of place, uncertain how to proceed until Lecter beckoned him closer and pointed out an adjoining room he could use to disrobe.

A part of Will remained lost in Jerusalem. Discomfort bloomed in his chest and he ran a hand through his curls, already in disarray, before shoving his hands in his pocket, determined not to keep his composure. Glancing around, he realized with a start that he vaguely recognized one of the undergraduates. Someone from one of his psychology tutorials, perhaps, or a cafe around town; a girl with long, dark straight hair and calm blue eyes who looked back at him expectantly from across the room. He hoped he was imagining the look of slight mortification on her face as he gave a slight nod and wracked his mind for her name.

Perhaps the professor took Will’s look for hesitation, because he walked over, looking from the girl to Will, his brow furrowed. “You have done this before, yes?”

“Yes. I modeled as an undergraduate. I know some of the classic poses. I’m just, uh, sorry—distracted. I’ll focus.” He avoided Dr. Lecter’s gaze. 

“Please do. I will require your cooperation in order for this to work.” Lecter paused until Will looked up, and then continued. “I will have to position you in order to mimic the form of the sculptures we’re studying. Also, Mr. Graham...I hope this goes without saying, but our last model had difficulty with this...please keep silent during the session.” His voice betrayed a seed of distaste. 

Distracted a little by the dark-haired girl, who continued to watch him, and the professor’s odd instructions, Will only nodded firmly and said, “Shouldn’t be a problem.” He headed for the adjoining room to change, embarrassed that Dr. Lecter would assume he was some kind of distractible idiot when in fact Will knew he was good at this.

He looked forward to proving his mettle, and emptying his mind for a few hours under the divine madness of that grey light. In the little room next door, he stripped down, shivering only slightly in the chill. He suddenly remembered the weekly stipend for this work and felt relieved; it would be a good excuse for a little indulgent grocery shopping. He had not eaten meat in weeks. 

Will settled into the first hour of posing, and his mind emptied little by little. It was a balm. Even nude he felt himself alone in that room, looking no one in the eye, and responding only to the quiet, occasional directions of Dr. Lecter. “Left arm above your head, if you please.” At first, the professor had him choose his own poses, so the students could do ten-minute sketches as a warm-up. “A new pose, if you please. Something seated.”

In the second hour, however, Dr. Lecter’s instructions came more often, and although Will did not meet his eyes, he felt the man’s gaze returning to settle upon Will’s skin with proprietary admiration. His physical corrections came more often too: his touch was cool and professional, utterly neutral, yet Will felt warmed, almost smoothed into place, his body made malleable as clay. Blissfully, Will’s mind felt truly emptied of his studies. He merely posed and waited for Dr. Lecter’s word or light touch.

Soothed, the physical work was all too easy. In the silence of the room, the scratch of pencils against paper on easels around him, Will found it more difficult to avoid Dr. Lecter’s eyes. Each time those hands poised to adjust his limbs to match a certain sculpture projected on the screen on the wall, Lecter would pause, watching Will’s face. Some poses felt like a test. Will could feel that gaze like a cool sheet against his skin, asking for something. Striving for professional neutrality, Will refused to look him in the eye each time. The silence inside Will’s own head was dependent on it.

It was not his warm hands or the nearness of his tactile gaze that wore him down. It was the mahogany rasp of Lecter’s voice for three maddening hours, occasionally approaching near enough to ripple nerves down Will’s side at the sound of it.

“Next we will examine the Farnese Hercules, or Herakles, a Roman copy of a Greek classic. Attributed to Lysippus and unearthed at the Caracalla Baths in Rome, and in place of pride downstairs in the Sculpture Cast Gallery, as it should be.” He addressed the class, Will knew, and yet the pitch and timbre of his voice seemed calibrated to describe Will himself. It unsettled him.

Dr. Lecter lifted Will’s hand to reposition him again, and Will became conscious of the warmth of the professor’s skin against his own chilled limbs. After long hours, the chill of the room having settled into him, Will felt hyper-aware now of where Dr. Lecter’s attention was directed at any one moment.

The professor draped Will’s arm over a supporting beam, and then his warm hands settled just above Will’s hips and tilted him to match the shifted posture of the sculpture, one hip higher, weighted, and one foot forward and lax. His hands were gentle but exacting, and continued to minutely adjust him. 

Once finished, Will stood in contrapposto and felt different, stronger. Not quite himself. With one last gesture, Dr. Lecter placed a hand on Will’s mess of dark curls and pressed downward until he was looking down at the ground ahead. “Just so,” he said, so quietly only Will could hear. 

“This monument originally stood nearly eleven feet tall, emphasizing the heroic nature of Herakles,” the professor continued, moving back to gaze at Will from a slight distance. Out of the corner of his eye, Will caught his nod of approval. It settled like a warm coal in the center of his chilled body, almost making him shiver. The feeling nearly overwhelmed him: he had to focus carefully to achieve quiet in his mind once again.

It was sometime later when he was startled out of his reverie, feeling Lecter at his side once more, this time reaching for his free hand and drawing it behind Will’s back, as if to handcuff him. 

“The sculpture’s best surprise is a little hard to see from how the sculpture gallery has it displayed, I’m afraid.” He adjusted Will’s hand so it was open and loose, cradling something imaginary just behind one hip. “You see, Herakles holds the apples of the Hesperides behind his back, having fetched them as his eleventh labor.” The touch of the professor’s fingers in Will’s open palm surprised him; he drew three circles there with his fingertips, as if describing the location of the apples in space, even though few if any of the students were in a position to see this detail. The intimacy of the gesture made it difficult to focus on anything else. 

“The golden apples were obtained at the end of a long and perilous—some say tedious—adventure, yet here they rest in his hand, rather ordinary when it comes down to it.” He continued to lecture, directing the class to focus on the contrapposto details, while he continued to reposition Will’s hand against the skin of his hip and manipulate each of Will’s fingers to get the pose correct. Will’s hand, bloodless with cold now, seemed to burn in the warmth of the man’s attention, pliable to his touch. The professor lingered over the details of this.

Finally Dr. Lecter straightened up with a sudden inhale, pronouncing, “Good, good,” again under his breath so that only Will could hear. He walked away, circling the easels, so that Will could not see him anymore, and he felt a palpable chill at his side where the warmth of the man had been standing. He felt simultaneously reassured and abandoned: he had never once been fussed over like this. The exacting professor was plainly too polite to voice any objections to Will’s capabilities as a model until after the close of the session.

A projector threw an image of the sculpture against the far wall, and when Will finally risked craning his neck around enough to glimpse it—colossal, god-like, muscled torso of shining white marble—he snapped back into position, swallowing a sick feeling of nervous anticipation. He knew with certainty that his abilities as a model were not enough to overcome his distracted, exhausted demeanor. He spent the remaining minutes locked in his own thoughts, growing colder by the minute and trying to steel himself for what he knew would come after.

When the session came to a conclusion, he stepped off the platform and rolled his shoulders to loosen the stiffness as he headed for the changing room. He did not wish to be fired in the nude.

His limbs were wracked by chills or nerves, he could not be certain which, when he stepped back into the empty studio, fully if hastily dressed. Only one student remained—the dark-haired girl whose name he still did not remember, talking to Professor Lecter at the front of the room—but when she saw Will approaching, she left quickly, not meeting his eye. He realized dumbly that it was the height of awkwardness to see someone nude when you know them vaguely from somewhere; he made a mental note to not look her in the eye again. Not that he would be back.

He fully intended to thank Dr. Lecter when he approached the front of the room, but instead he asked for a second chance, shivering. “Let me come back one more time and I won’t be so distracted, I promise.” A chatter ran through his jaw like live electricity.

Lecter’s brow immediately wrinkled in concern. “Are you well, Mr. Graham?” He stepped closer and reached out to his warm. Will drew back but his hand closed over Will’s forearm. He frowned at the chill he felt there, even through the layers of sweater and shirt.

“Mr. Graham, are you well?” 

The fading afternoon light through the skylight could not conceal the flinch that rippled through Will, though he tried to pass it off as a shiver and stepped back from the professor’s touch. Pity was unbearable. Fatigue mixed with the chill mixed with everything that he could not shake from his mind.

_ I haven’t been myself _ . No, that’s not right. 

_ I have been too much myself. _

“Just...cold,” Will managed to say, wrapping his arms around himself and looking over toward the door, wanting only to escape. “Been a while since I posed that long. Sorry.”

“Apology not accepted.” He paused, again, until Will looked up. “You were a perfect Herakles.” His voice laid bare that proprietary gleam again, betraying a possessive spark beneath his casual veneer. And Lecter’s expression held not a trace of jest or empty flattery, no matter how long Will dared look. The golden brown of the professor’s eyes, in fact, betrayed only something gentle just then, as if he saw something of the younger man’s struggle just then and wished to say something and did not know how.

Will stood silent, unable to explain, unable to escape, waiting for him to speak. Instead, Lecter seemed to come to a decision.

Gathering his briefcase under one arm, he turned and gestured with his arm circling around Will’s shoulders. “I must insist you join me in my office for tea. It’s the least I can do. Consider it hazard pay for the drafty conditions in this old building.” Lecter guided Will toward the doorway with the lightest of touches between Will’s shoulders, his voice gentle again. Will could hear it already.  _ You understand, it’s for the best. Perhaps you’re not suited... _ he did not want to do this over tea.

“I’m sorry, I’ve been distracted all afternoon by this...I don’t want to trouble you. Just tell me if I should come back next week.” He swallowed nervously when Lecter did not seem to take the hint, merely stopped next to him in the hall and waited. Will turned to the building’s exit doors, their windows already obscured with droplets, and resigned himself to a long, cold, wet walk. “Dr. Lecter, I should be getting home. I’m just—”

“I know.” He did not elaborate. He simply gazed at Will, taking in everything from his tense shoulders to the aching soles of his feet.  “I know,” he repeated, softer this time. “That’s why you’re coming upstairs, Mr. Graham. Tea and conversation can be a different kind of distraction, perhaps one that works better than whatever you’ve been trying.”

It hit too close to the bone. What did this man know? Between the chills still crawling down his skin and the inchoate hunger lurking beneath his fatigue, he followed the man down the hallway, silently assenting to whatever this was going to be.

 

“Do you know Epictetus, by chance?” Lecter asked brightly, opening the door to a stairwell. “His Discourses?” He was a graceful victor; he was not going to reveal what he understood about Will, or how. Not yet, anyway.

“I’m afraid it’s been a long time since I read philosophy,” Will said. “Not a lot of call for it in psychology.”

“I do think there is some crossover between philosophy and psychology,” Dr. Lecter said. “Epictetus had interesting theories about heroes. Herakles in particular. He asked what Herakles would have been if there was nothing terrible in the world — no struggle, nothing to test him.” At the end of the second-floor hallway, Lecter fished keys out of his pocket and paused, his hand on the doorknob. “What would you say? What would that make Herakles?”

“Ordinary, I suppose. Not a hero. Is that what he meant?”

“Yes,” he said with a faint smile. “Epictetus said, ‘He would have rolled over in his blankets and gone back to sleep.’” Lecter looked down to unlock the door, his motions smooth and precise, lost in thought. “But then what would have been the use of those arms, that physique, that noble soul, without a crisis to stir him into action?” His voice was reverent, adoring, as if reciting the words of a love letter. After a moment, he fixed his gaze closely on Will’s face again. “Is that you, Mr. Graham? The noble soul without a crisis?” 

Will could not have said why he almost confessed the whole mess of his mind to Lecter in that moment, or why he felt so acutely that the man had already read everything he needed to know on the surface of Will’s skin, and simply wished to hear Will himself speak it into being. “A soul without a crisis is simply a person in good mental health, in my field,” Will offered, fiddling with the button on his sleeve and grasping for respectable distance.

They entered the professor’s office, a room lined with neat bookshelves and with an understated peace to it. More a private library than an office, hushed and separate. Lecter offered Will an armchair by the window. “Have you ever known a person to be truly, completely without a crisis, deep down?”

“Crisis isn’t my...well—I’m not going into psychotherapy, if that’s what you mean. I study psychopathology.”

Professor Lecter ignored this and pressed on, watching Will’s reaction. “The Greeks would not have seen much of a difference. ‘Would you possess the fruit of a man’s mind in so short a time and so easily?’ Both are ways to know a person,” he said, unblinking. “One can be possessed by philosophy as much as by pathology. Possession, of course, in the sense of knowledge. Don’t you agree?”

In the short span of an afternoon, Will himself had been possessed by Chilton’s self-mutilating Frenchman, a spectre of delusion rising out of the walls of the city itself, and then again by Lecter’s voice and touch, familiar and proprietary. In between, there had been a measure of peace, Will had to remind himself.

But was that enough? If this professor could see and understand him in the space of one possessed afternoon, Will had his doubts. He wrapped his jacket closer around himself for warmth.

“Mr. Graham?” Lecter prompted, his eyes flickering over Will’s face. 

“No,” Will replied, looking up at last. “Possession isn’t half bad.” Against his better judgment, Will found he was telling the truth. 

* * *


	2. Mars Restrained by Cupid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tea in Hannibal's office.

* * *

 

 

Professor Lecter pushed down the electric kettle's switch to heat water for tea and then set a tray down on the table between them with a number of unusual things on it. Will watched with interest as he first opened a finely made, smooth wooden box and took out a round object wrapped in paper printed with Chinese characters. Unwrapped, it revealed a dark, compressed quantity of tea leaves. Lecter took up an oddly shaped knife to delicately loosen a portion of the tea; even dry, it filled the room with a rich, earthy aroma, utterly different from anything Will had ever been exposed to before.

“This is pu-erh tea,” he said, carrying the electric kettle over when it whistled low. He poured hot water over the leaves in the small iron teapot on the table between them. “The leaves are aged for years, sometimes decades or more. This one is about twenty years old.” Lecter leaned forward to breathe in the steam rising from the top of the teapot, and then added a little more water and settled the lid atop it. “I once had the great fortune to taste pu-erh that had been aging since before the Cultural Revolution.”

“What did it taste like?”

He tilted his head as he remembered. “Flowers gone to dust in a tomb. Like Yiwu, where they were grown, and cherrywood smoke.” He paused. “Like marrow from the middle of the bone.” It was an intimate answer, so that Will wished to look away from the intensity of the hunger he saw for a moment in Lecter’s eyes. 

Dr. Lecter said nothing to disturb the quiet for a moment after that, merely picked up the tea knife and idly turned it in his palm. He cleaned it with the pads of his fingers, pressing fragrant dust off the scalloped surface of the sharp blade.

He put the knife back into the little box with the wrapped-up tea and looked up, a milder, polite expression fixed in place. “I quite enjoy the British fondness for tea, but not their insistence on drinking tea with all the charm and flavor of a factory floor.”

Will laughed, a little startled. “I thought I was the only one who didn’t like it.”

“We foreigners have to stick together,” the professor said with a conspiratorial sideways glance at Will as he checked the teapot once more. “This has to steep a while longer. I hope you’re not in a rush.” Will shook his head. “Good. You will drink it, and then you will tell me if you like my version better,” he said. 

Will shifted in his seat slightly, hearing a hint of command hidden under the smooth, even tones of the professor’s cultured accent -- the same distractingly gentle yet proprietary voice and gaze that had positioned him all afternoon now would accept no refusal. Tea carved with a knife; an offer that was not a question. Will remained the pliant figure on display, Lecter the director of his movements. He did not mind it, strangely.

Unable to say anything intelligent for the moment, Will stood to look at a nearby bookcase, examining a few of the titles. Among the books were a few framed photographs. He noticed one of a statue standing in a familiar pose. “This almost looks like Hercules. Sort of the same position, I mean, hand behind the hip and everything.”

Lecter’s lips twitched a little in amusement. “Perhaps there are some similarities...it is not Greek, however. Not by a long shot. I can see why you might think so. The Greeks made this kind of pose famous, but this one is a pale neoclassical imitation. If you compare it to the Herakles—they are both relaxed, but Herakles’ muscles display a balance of strain and heroism, a superhuman physicality befitting his heroic status. This sculptor has instead rendered figures with such softness that you might be forgiven for not knowing the taller one is intended to be Mars, the God of War.” Lecter adjusted the picture on the shelf. “Mars restrained by Cupid, that’s the little winged child to one side. It is nineteenth century, by the technically talented but artistically insipid John Gibson.”

Will looked closer at Mars’ plumed helmet and the diminutive Cupid, its childlike hand gentle on the taller god’s arm. “All  _ techne _ , no  _ arete _ —no excellence or...artistry—have I got that right?”

“Ah, yes. Professor Hunter mentioned that you had read my article. Yes, the skill is there, and many would call it beautiful. It was greatly admired in its time. But it lacks…a certain grace.” He gestured to another photograph further along the shelf. “Compare it to this one from Pierre Julien, another imitator of the Greeks. Every line of his Dying Gladiator flows with the grace of death—his muscles, his bones and veins, all along the surface of his skin. His wound…” Lecter indicated the weeping cut on the statue’s chest, not quite touching the glass of the picture frame, and curved his hand as if to catch the drops of blood that fell. “And look at the hand—you could reach out and touch it, and it would feel warm. It’s soft, like the Gibson, but the Julien is more...human. Flesh.” 

Lecter stood very close to Will now as they both regarded the picture, and when he turned to look at him, Will realized with a start they were mere inches apart. “You would make an excellent model for this one, you know. The lines here and here, particularly,” he mused, one finger skimming along the line of Will’s shoulder and trailing down his upper arm. “Perhaps Julien used a young Parisian rower as a model for his work…your shoulders are so similar.” He took a sudden breath as if rousing himself from a reverie and returned to the table to check the tea. “Pity I’m teaching the Hellenistic Form and not the rococo and neoclassical form.”

Will felt the ghost of Lecter’s warmth along his arm and a leftover shiver traced down where his touch had lingered. 

Dr. Lecter’s tea was rich and complex on the tongue. Will found it as unexpected as their conversation, and as difficult to categorize. Lulled by the comforts of the professor’s office, it took Will some time to realize he was still being observed closely. Will had felt it during the studio session, he realized, but it had simply seemed like part of the background noise, a necessity of the arrangement. In Lecter’s study, however, it became a palpable quality of the air between them.

“You look much better now,” said Lecter, sipping from his own china cup slowly. The tea slowly warmed Will from the inside out and he settled a little deeper into the chair.

“I was...not myself today. Sometimes I...well, a research topic just gets stuck in your head, I guess.” He willed himself not to say too much, not to discuss the Jerusalem Syndrome case study. He wondered, though, what would happen if he followed his impulse to tell Dr. Lecter exactly what it was like inside his head, the maddening feeling of the gates he might stumble through for watching them so closely. “I’m prone to that sort of thing.”

“Obsession?”

Will colored. “No, I—a topic catches my interest. Case studies, mostly.” He cleared his throat forcefully to stop himself from saying more about it; Lecter was going to refer him for involuntary hospitalization if he wasn’t careful. “It’s why I’m in research. I don’t work with patients. People are too—there’s a sort of...blurring of lines...”

“Is that a danger of therapy?” Hannibal said, his face unreadable.

“Not for everyone,” Will said, choosing his words with care. “Maybe just for people who are prone to...getting too...interested. I need distractions. Rowing, figure modeling. I don’t want to get stuck—to go too far.” He met Dr. Lecter’s gaze for a moment and felt his heart pounding a little, wondering how much he understood. Will fiddled with his teacup and looked away. “Anyway, it’s not a big deal. Not usually. I mean, it doesn’t affect my work.” A lie, but a necessary one.

If Dr. Lecter saw through it, he did not say so. 

“Can I ask you something?” Will gestured at the framed art on the bookshelves. “If you don’t like Mars Restrained by Cupid, why do you keep that photo?”

“It was a gift from someone who...did not know my tastes very well,” Lecter said, returning to his armchair.

Will’s gaze lingered on the pale marble limbs of the pair of figures in the photograph, who could almost be father and child. He blamed the tea for his jitters and leaned in, desperate to change the subject. “So is Cupid restraining Mars so well that all the violence has been drained out of him? War through the eyes of love, or something like that? Cupid is just a kid who doesn’t know his dad is—doesn’t know  _ what  _ his father is. But the kid is more powerful than the father, in a way, for being able to see it like that.”

“A very psychoanalytical interpretation, Mr. Graham,” the professor commented, regarding him with the full force of his extraordinary eyes. “Violence swayed by love? Not for the Greeks, and not in life, certainly.”

“No. It’s never that simple, is it,” Will replied, lost in thought. “And anyway, are they inherently different things?” he said to himself. He turned back to take up his teacup again, and found Lecter’s eyes fully absorbed in searching him, surprised by the question and made wary.

“Classic Greek literature is full of volumes about violent love,” was all Lecter offered in response, after a brief silence. A test of a reply.

“So is psychopathology,” Will replied evenly. A conversation about nothing and everything at once; like being seen and seeing Lecter in turn, but only these strange glimpses. He could not look away, nor could he stop himself from being examined and seen.  _ Pinned like a specimen _ , Will thought.

“Do you like it?”

“Sorry?” Will asked.  _ Being pinned. _ Warmth burned in him like a drug.

“The pu-ehr. Do you like it?”

“Yes. I like it very much.”

“Good. Mr. Graham—”

“Please, call me Will.”

“Will, then. I must confess something. I brought you upstairs today under false pretenses.”

“You don’t carve tea for all your art models?”

Dr. Lecter chuckled softly. “Maybe I should have. The previous student was...not well suited to it. His talents lay elsewhere. You, on the other hand—”

“Professor, I meant what I said before. Let me come back next week and I’ll be in much better shape. I enjoy this work. I...need it.”

Lecter paused mid-sentence and one eyebrow went up. His sudden, satisfied smile made the room feel warmer. “Well, that makes this a lot easier. I brought you up here to convince you to stay on for the semester, even with the drafty studio conditions. I was planning to offer to double the stipend, in fact, because you are obviously experienced, and your form is so well-suited to Hellenistic sculpture I would hate to lose you to something that paid better. Between the cold of the studio and whatever caused you to...well, I did not think you were planning to come back.”

“I’d like to. Come back. If you’ll—if the department will have me.” Will continued boldly, “Is that double-stipend offer still good?”

“It would please me to pay you what you are worth,” was Dr. Lecter’s only comment as he stood to shake Will’s hand.

“Thank you, professor,” Will could only say, relief making him stand up a little straighter.

“Please, call me Hannibal.”

“Thank you, Hannibal,” he said, feeling the syllables of the old-fashioned name on his tongue, unfamiliar as aged tea. 

“Until next week,” Hannibal said as Will nodded in farewell from the doorway on his way out, trying to swallow the brighter glee that turned into a grin as soon as he was alone in the hallway. 

The feeling, as he clattered down the empty stairwell and walked out into the drizzling dark afternoon, echoed like light against mirrors inside him, relief mixing with adrenaline. It was very odd, he thought, buttoning his jacket against the rain, what a little bit of money could do in a poor student’s pocket; the thrill of anticipation in his belly he chalked up to the strange tea and the even stranger conversation.

 

* * *


	3. The Laocoon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will poses for a sculpture with snakes! Who doesn't love snakes? (If you don't like snakes, please don't read this chapter.)
> 
> Lines blur a bit more.

Vivid golden afternoon light spilled through the door of the art studio, but the studio itself was darkened when Will arrived the following week. The skylight and high windows now draped in opaque black fabric, several studio lights beamed light at a small platform with a black drape.

Perhaps owing to the heat of the studio lamps and the black fabric trapping the air, the room was quite warm, the air almost too close for comfort. Will shed his jacket and scarf.

He was early once again, and expecting Hannibal to arrive, but the footsteps that came to the door brought only a student who nervously peeked through the doorway before pulling in a hand truck loaded down with a large wooden crate.

“Thank God he’s not here yet,” the girl muttered, breath a little labored as she wheeled the truck to the front of the room near where Will stood. Her steps were nervous and halting with the weight she pulled, so that the keys and ID on a lanyard around her neck clinked noisily together as she moved. He saw  _ Elise Nichols  _ before the identification card swung and flipped around. “He wanted this delivered from storage hours ago,” she grunted, pulling it the final few steps, “but I couldn’t find the hand truck and this thing is too damned heavy.”

“Secret’s safe with me,” Will joked, trying to allay her nerves. But her eyes popped wide and she fumbled with the handle of the thing, landing the wood crate with a loud, creaking thump on the floor.

“Oh my God, you wouldn’t say anything to him, right? I’ve heard the rumors. He’ll probably get me sacked.”

“He’s really not like that,” Will said with a disbelieving look.

“Like what?” said a familiar voice from the doorway, and they both turned. Hannibal stood surveying Will and Elise, not smiling but not frowning, either. Will felt terrible for the undergraduate, who was trying to be stealthy about wiping her sweaty palms on her jeans and looking fidgety.

“Like a despot,” Will offered. The girl froze in place.

“Is that what they say about me? Well, then. Off with your head, Elise,” Hannibal said, aiming a brief, dry smile at the girl. She blinked and let out a single, awkward  _ ha _ . 

“I don’t care as long as you got it here before the start of class,” Lecter shrugged. “I have a reputation to maintain, Elise. Off you go. Don’t forget to tell them I was an awful, demanding person.” Her head lowered, the girl wheeled the hand truck out of the room without a word.

He turned to look at the crate and glanced over at Will. “This won’t be an easy session.”

“Why do you say that?” As Will watched, Hannibal took a clawed hammer out of his leather satchel and began to pry off the lid of the wooden crate. The nails ripped up from the wood with a creaky protest and in a nest of straw lay the curves of something dark and inert and too still; some kind of prop, he realized. 

Lecter reached in and used both hands to pull out a snake, grasping the head of the prop and a section of its coils. It appeared to be over ten feet long, thicker than his own arm along most of its length, and quite heavy, to Will’s surprise. “Also, just a short studio session today. Sketching and lecture first, then over to the Cast Gallery to see the Laocoön in person. You’re welcome to come along if you like.” He paused and looked up. “You’re not afraid of snakes, are you?” He pulled another one from deeper in the nest of straw. 

Will opened his mouth and tried to formulate his words in a way that sounded better than what immediately came to mind:  _ Is this truly necessary?  _ “They’re not real. What would I have to worry about?”

Lecter did not answer him directly, merely looked at him carefully, considering this answer. “When we begin, just sit on the platform.”

The students entered, which was Will’s cue to change out of his clothes, but then the dark-haired girl from the previous week appeared, blocking his path to the adjoining room. He flashed her an uncomfortable, apologetic smile, wishing to avoid the embarrassment of the previous week, and Lecter noticed.

“Abigail, have you met Mr. Graham before?”

The girl’s eyes betrayed no embarrassment when Will looked up; perhaps it had all been in his own mind. “Well, I know his old flatmate, Alana. I think we met once or twice,” she said, and then smoothly sidestepped him to set up her sketchbook at an easel. Her dark hair swung over her shoulder and a memory solidified in Will’s mind. 

Before Alana’s difficult break-up with her girlfriend, after which she had moved out on her own, they had shared a flat for over a year. Alana loved to host gatherings—eclectic, noisy, smoky debates and potlucks more liquid than solid—the sort of event Will preferred to avoid, staying in the library until it was late enough that most of her guests had stumbled home. 

Her girlfriend Margot had been there one night when he returned, hand-rolled cigarette poised between her long, pale fingers. Wine glasses and empty bottles on every surface in sight. Margot the mercurial eye of the storm, always at the center of the party; she was a scholar in a specialized interdisciplinary field that involved classics, which was how Will had first heard the gossip about Dr. Lecter.  _ Possibly a genius, definitely a despot _ , she had said. And there, between Margot and Alana on the sagging tweed couch, a younger girl, dark hair swinging as she spoke, by turns animated and sly.  _ Abigail _ . A pretty girl, very young, he recalled thinking, probably one of Margot’s followers. Her eyes sleepy but luminous, playing at being older than she was. 

Before him, now, she looked different. Sober, certainly, but also more solemn. Altogether different from the wide-eyed girl he had met before. 

He stuttered an apology and Abigail shrugged, barely paying attention. He turned to go to the other room to change, slightly relieved.

 

“Laocoön and his sons were punished by Poseidon—or Apollo, depending on whether you ask Virgil or Sophocles—for either defiling a temple, or for trying to warn Troy about the Trojan Horse. Either he was punished for being wrong, or punished for being right...or like most of us, maybe a little of both.” Polite laughter echoed through the classroom as the supervision began. Will sat on the platform, the lights at either side throwing his body into dramatic shadow and light. 

“Much ink has been spilled about the Laocoön story and this particular sculpture, which was described by Pliny the Elder and unearthed in the Renaissance. It has been called the archetypal depiction of suffering, but it does so in a very particular way. I have asked our model Mr. Graham to begin in a neutral seated position so we can better visualize how and why the musculature of the Laocoön pose is so effective.”

Dr. Lecter dimmed the remaining lights outside the circle of studio lamps spotlighting Will’s little platform and switched on a projector. An image of the sculpture appeared on the wall, and in the near-darkness Will was at first too overwhelmed by the roiling forms to understand what he saw.

The sinuous marble shapes resolved into a man, half seated, overcome by vast, strangling coils of snakes. They circled over and around him, twining and deadly; two small figures struggled on either side of the man, one dying, the other trying in vain to escape, perhaps. The man, head and face contorted, suffering plain and agonized, twisted away from the fangs of one snake poised to sink its bite into the naked flesh of his hip.

Hannibal asked Will to position only his feet and legs to match the statue at first, which Will did with no difficulty. He kept his hips relaxed and his hands at his side while Dr. Lecter lectured, and allowed himself to slip in and out of the empty feeling he craved. With his feet posed on the little steps of the boxy platform, minutes passed easily in near quiet, with the professor’s even tones and the quieter fuzz of pencils and charcoals sketching. 

This pose was more revealing. Will found himself wondering exactly what had happened with the last model, given his reported inexperience. It was not enough to be confident without clothes, Will learned long ago: it required something beyond vulnerability.  There are ways and ways of being nude in front of strangers, and not all of them are comfortable.

Will, for one, drifted in the silence of his own making. No one could learn anything from his skin. His eyes, perhaps; those he kept averted, out of habit. 

“Will?” 

He roused himself with a slow blink. “Sorry, what?”

“Back now?” Lecter asked. At Will’s apologetic nod, Lecter turned to face the class. “We will now examine the torque of the torso—Mr. Graham, if you would, please.”

Will glanced at the projected image and twisted to the side slightly, imitating the statue’s contorted position. He tipped his shoulders a little bit, craning his neck to the side ever so slightly. Dr. Lecter’s hand on his arm stopped him from moving further. “A brief comparison, if you will allow me—notice the articulated musculature here, and here at the hip, when he holds this position. Now compare it to this.” With one hand cradled behind Will’s back, Hannibal gently guided Will back into a neutral pose, and then moved him into the twisted position once again. “Relax, if you can,” Hannibal said quietly, only to Will. Will exhaled slowly, trying to concentrate, and released all the strain from his abdomen and back muscles, until he was held in the awkward contortion only by Hannibal’s surprising strength. 

It was entirely new and strange. 

“Notice the difference?” Dr. Lecter then stepped away, allowing Will to hold the position through muscular tension once more. “The form here suggests pain in such an effective way because Laocoön both suffers and holds still in an active moment of suffering. The natural reaction to pain, to a snake attack, might be to flee. Instead, we see Laocoön’s sons trying and failing to escape, and Laocoön himself still sitting here, his body writhing away a bit, but not too much. This was important to the Greeks—to tame emotional extremes to the point where beauty was still accessible.”

For once, Will found himself listening to the lecture. The words filtered into his consciousness as he strained to hold the slight contortion of the pose.  _ Accessible extremes _ , he heard echoing as he failed to find any inner quiet,  _ beautiful yet still hideous _ .  __

After some minutes, Dr. Lecter approached Will. He said in that quieter voice again, “I need you to resist, just a little bit, to make this next part work.” Will scarcely had time to comprehend this before Hannibal placed his hands on the front and back of Will’s chest, palms broad and firmly planted. Will’s heartbeat faltered a little at the sudden intensity of the contact, and for a moment their eyes met and Will’s instinct was to go lax—only later would he ask himself whether it would have been away or toward him. A stray lock of Lecter’s straight brown hair fell down over one eye as he looked at Will from entirely too close a position, with entirely too much knowledge in his eyes. 

Will heard only the softly repeated command,  _ resist _ : he held firm as the professor lifted. Twisted in Laocoön’s pose, Lecter now used the strength of his hands to pull the upper half of his body upward, straining against gravity, straining against the pull of Will’s own muscles and bones.

They held still there for one long moment, the struggle of it causing part of Will’s trapezius to start spasming and his breath to go short. Not the slightest bit disturbed by the effort, Lecter then let go. and calmly instructed the class on this newest variation. 

Will heard not a word. He struggled to hold the strange half-lifted pose, made only somewhat easier without struggling against the pull of Dr. Lecter’s hands. His inner quiet was nowhere to be found. He was now a man trying to escape his own body. Will felt Laocoön’s desperation sink into his own skin. The poison sting at his hip, the terrible sound that would come from his open mouth. Will held it, and held it; his eyes finally raised to meet Hannibal’s, and all he saw there was the barest hint of a satisfied expression. Will could do nothing more than listen, now.

“This, then, is the beauty of Laocoön’s suffering. The man remains still, though his very form resists stillness and tries to escape. What is it like to hold this pose, Mr. Graham?”

There were a few uneasy, sympathetic titters in the class at his direct question, and Will emitted a huff of laughter. “Not my favorite, I’ll give you that.” 

“Good,” said Hannibal softly. 

It wasn’t until much later, in the sculpture cast gallery that the studio session caught up with Will. He had dressed hurriedly and entered the gallery at the tail end of Dr. Lecter’s gallery talk; as the students moved to a different room of the museum, Will found himself face to face with Laocoön. His palms felt clammy when he clenched his fists at the sight of the serpents, coiling in a way that felt far too intimately familiar. 

There had been a long hour, prior to the gallery talk, where Professor Lecter had carefully posed the prop snakes around Will’s limbs, demonstrating restoration attempts that had been attempted in antiquity and later removed. Props; rubber and wire and leaden weights. Yet the constriction along his skin had felt more real than he had been prepared for. 

Will looked up and saw the statue’s missing arm, where Will’s arm had been posed, bent back holding a coil of a snake. Hannibal had said again, just behind Will’s shoulder, “Resist a little,” as he coolly posed it around him, forcing the constriction of the snakes where weight alone would not create the proper tension. 

It had been strenuous in more ways than one. Will had followed the class to the gallery talk partly to prove (to himself or to Lecter, he was not quite sure) that he was not as affected by the posing session as he had been the first time. 

The strain caught up with him, and the red walls of the gallery glowed almost garishly in the afternoon light. The space teemed with forms both living and marble: there were so many sculptures crowded into such a small space that it blurred into a sea of marble limbs and skin. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come here; he had spent two hours straining under the burden of a man dying among venomous snakes. It was a distraction no doubt, just not a very restful one.

Will could tell the gallery talk was nearly over and he shouldered his bag, ready to slip out before the students crowded the exit. Turning to leave, Hannibal’s closing words caught his ear. “His suffering is the whole point. We require the frozen howl.” The phrase _frozen howl_ fell from Hannibal’s lips much like his other well-loved quotations, softly and with reverence. His mouth fairly smiled around it.

“The ‘classic frozen howl’, as the quote goes, is unredeemed, in the end. Laocoön’s suffering is not to an end. It is not a lesson. It is a mistake to view it through the Christian lens on suffering that the German commentators attempted, because his suffering gets him nowhere and that is the whole point. What you must understand is that the aesthetic pleasure of the viewer is an integral part of Laocoön’s suffering. We enjoy the beauty of his pain; his pain is made worse by it. Much like his warning to the Trojans went unheeded, his suffering goes unheeded by us. We are privileged to look and enjoy, eternally.” Lecter tilted his face up a little, looking at the oversized statue from across the gallery, his features warmed by the diffuse gallery light. 

In the end, Will lingered, waiting for the students to depart. There was something about that suffering, about that inflicting of an aesthetic of pain that both bothered and intrigued him, though he struggled to even understand in his own mind how to put it into words.

Hannibal turned to him, pausing. If he saw the flush on Will’s overheated cheeks, he said nothing. “Another cup of tea today?”

“I should...get going.” Will worried at the corner of his lip before looking Lecter in the eye. “I enjoyed the session today. And the lecture.”

Lecter drank in this eye contact for a moment, thinking. “I should be thanking you. My methods with props have been called unorthodox, but they are an integral part of it, I’m afraid. It’s not easy, what you did today.”

Will laughed a little, uneasy at the softness in the professor’s voice. “It makes it real.”  _ Too real.  _

“Tension is very critical to the composition.”

Will looked again at the statue, the open mouth contorted in pain. “I notice you didn’t have me imitate his facial expression. Maybe I should stop shaving, grow a beard.”

But Hannibal did not take this as a joke and looked closely at Will’s cheek and jaw, as if picturing it there for a moment. Will felt the force of his gaze across his skin like a palpable touch.

“Laocoön’s face is a whole other matter of study, no need to confuse the topic,” Hannibal said. “We learn enough from the body alone.”

“I don’t know...wouldn’t it be nice to know whether he was really tormented by the gods? Maybe his problems were a bit more mundane.”

Lecter’s eyes traced the snake’s pathway around Laocoön’s leg. “How so?” 

“Hallucination of snakes, fear of prosecution by gods or humans, belief in prophetic powers...” He could picture it in his mind, exactly how a man like Laocoön would show up in the case study literature.  _ Male, otherwise asymptomatic, classic paranoia. Claims the city is under attack.  _ “Endangerment of self, refusal to conform to cultural norms, all features of psychosis. Someone is fine one day, and the next—they stop going to work, stop performing their usual role in society.” Disheveled, curls matted, eyes wild. Writhing.  _ The gods have cursed me. They torment me with snakes. Don’t you see?  _ Will shook his arms a little to dispel the lingering tension from the Laocoön pose. “The snakes might be random, might be a manifestation of a particular memory or fear…”

Hannibal tutted. “Sometimes a snake is just a snake.” His gaze flickered at the center of the statue, the flaccid cock against the marble thigh, and then back at Will, his eyebrow raised. “The Greeks had no fear of  _ that  _ kind of snake. Sorry, Dr. Freud.” 

Will grimaced and raised his hands in defeat, dropping the point.

“But perhaps you do,” Hannibal said in a wry tone as he shrugged on his jacket.

Will swallowed a surprised laugh, wondering if Dr. Lecter’s was making a double entendre. “Uh...the kind with venom and scales, I mean—the kind that can really kill you.” He fiddled his scarf instead of meeting Hannibal’s eyes, knotting it around his neck against the chill of the afternoon.

“Who’s to say a serpent of the mind isn’t just as bad—that it can’t kill you as easily as a real snake?” was Hannibal’s mild response. 

That evening, taking a break from a tedious research review, Will found an email from Hannibal in his inbox. It contained two PDFs.  _ Persistent delusion of snake infestation following sexual intercourse: Two case studies _ and  _ Ophidianthropy: The case of a patient who turned into a snake.  _

The email merely read  _ More for your pantheon. -H.  _

He skimmed the articles quickly before he returned to his work, curious why Professor Lecter would research such an obscure corner of psychopathology. The ophidianthropy delusion paper was rather tedious; but the paper about the infestation delusions stuck with him long after he paged through the case write-ups. In both cases presented, the individuals were not entirely cured of their beliefs, maintaining that they were still infested with snakes long after psychiatric treatment should have taken effect.

Long into the night he idled in and out of sleep, sorting through thoughts that wove back and forth between awake and dreaming. Laocoön’s sons as small as snakes, marble forms writhing in a nest; a hammer prying a coiled snake off of marble, a knife against a shriveled tea leaf. 

Hannibal’s amber-dark eyes, his hands positioning Will’s naked torso, pulling him up until his ribs felt like they would crack. _ You must resist _ . Curling over Will, prying apart musculature, exposing what he found like a pearl in an oyster.  _ Resist a little. _ A serpent coiled around his torso, warm enough that it could be a hand, a bare arm, pulling him forward, up.  _ Don’t move. _

_ Do you like it? _

Will awoke, blankets twisted around his waist and cock half hard between his legs, confused; that echo of Hannibal’s voice, low and amused, in his head. 

He wanted to know if Hannibal intended him to feel the way he did, or if he intended Will to wonder. He wondered if was even possible to ruffle the surface control of such a man, to make him tremble the same way Will did, lying there breathless, not touching himself but aching and wet with need, resisting, awaiting instruction.

 

* * *

 

 

 


	4. Ilioneus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Defensive wounds.

Behind his desk, phone to his ear, Dr. Frederick Chilton motioned Will into his office, holding up a finger and silently mouthing, “ _ One minute _ .” Will slung his bag on one chair, sat down on the other, and gazed idly around. He did not look forward to these little consultations with Chilton, but it was a necessary evil. Dr. Chilton had been the faculty member to sponsor Will’s research proposal and continued to take a keen interest in steering his efforts, much to Will’s annoyance. 

“Yes, I am aware—certainly. I believe just this week, in fact.” Will was somewhat surprised to see Dr. Chilton raise his eyebrows at him as if asking Will for confirmation of something. “No, I don’t. ...I have not, no. My apologies, sir, but I have a meeting right now and I really can’t—yes, of course. Not to worry.” He hastily scribbled something on a notepad and bid the caller a good day before looking up at Will expectantly. “This is good timing. Bloom—she’s your flatmate, right?”

Will was taken aback. “I...no, she moved to her own place. Right before she left on her research trip. Why?”

“Well, a rather persistent investigator is trying to get ahold of her on behalf of the Vergers.” 

This rang a warning bell vaguely in the back of Will’s mind. He was wary, knowing how difficult Alana’s breakup with Margot Verger had been and that her family could be a difficult bunch. Alana and Margot had kindled an intense relationship, lasting perhaps five months before its sudden and troubling end. Alana never told him exactly why. Margot had not agreed to the breakup, that was all Alana had been willing to say of the complexities. 

There had been a week of broken sobbing behind Alana’s closed bedroom door, a ferocious mourning that Will felt ill-equipped to weather. He was on better footing when she emerged and asked for nothing more than a string of quiet nights in with a bottle of cheap red and his shoulder to lean on for company. 

Then there had been a month of Margot showing up with suspicious frequency at the pub that Will and Alana preferred. There were other, less easily ignored intrusions. At one point, Margot insisted on changing the locks, just in case. By October, Alana had been at her wit’s end and quietly arranged for a month-long research trip to Johns Hopkins University, back in Maryland, knowing that Margot had a teaching assistantship she would not dare risk jeopardizing.

Will could not think of any good reason why their breakup, no matter how sour, would cause the involvement of an investigator. Especially not so many months later. “I haven’t even seen Alana since she got back from Baltimore,” Will said, trying to be casual about it. Chilton could be pushy about such things. “She got a new number I think, too. I don’t have it. Do you want me to let her know, if I see her?”

“Just give her this, tell her to call the investigator herself,” Chilton said, ripping a piece of paper off of his notepad and handing it to Will with an exasperated sigh. “Tell her I’m not her answering service.”

“Sure.” Will pocketed the phone number. “Professor, we should probably discuss the timeline for my research prospectus. I’m not sure it’s ready for review yet...”

By the time Will left Chilton’s office, a headache pounded behind his eyes. Ignoring the pain, he merely grabbed a cup of coffee on the way to the library and hoped that afternoon’s session with Professor Lecter would settle him down. He settled his things at a table at the psychopathology library and opened his laptop. At the very least, he could get a head start on the long list of items Chilton told him to add to his prospectus. The coffee was bitter and burned his tongue, and it didn’t help, in the end.

After an hour of skimming Wheaton’s  _ Delusion: Etiologies in Genetic Disorders _ , the words seemed to twist before him. In the library’s quiet, his headache magnified every footstep and ruffled paper into a monumental annoyance. He could almost taste psychosis when the case studies began to blur together before him: it would be bright on the tongue, glad like revelation, a tumult of sound.

 

 

“Next we move on to Ilioneus. The torso of a youth, kneeling. It is believed to be one of the dying children of Niobe, felled by the arrows of Apollo and Artemis. However, that identification remains fluid. The copy here at Cambridge, as you can see on screen, has no arms or head. Sculptors have attempted to restore the missing parts. We will attempt to interpret a restoration today. Mr. Graham, if you please.”

Hannibal gestured to the cushioned platform at the front of the room and Will took a kneeling position in the center. The process of being moved into position to match the statue was almost a dance now, Will understanding instinctively when to go pliant and when to hold, when Lecter wished to pivot a particular limb to make a point to the class. This time, the headache still pounding away, Will decided to dive fully in. If he would not achieve a peaceful silence, then he would immerse himself in whatever Lecter gave him.

“Using the clear lines of the latissimus dorsi, contracted here, we can posit an arm raised like so...” Hannibal pulled Will’s arm into position. Forgetting himself, Will stared for a moment, seeing only the flecks of gold hiding in the hazel of Hannibal’s eyes. He let the dying youth sink into his mind, erasing his thoughts like a wave upon sand.

“The arm of the youth is defensive, reflected throughout the neck, the torso, even the legs. This is a tender youth cut down. As if fending off the arrows of Apollo and Artemis. Or any threat, if you like. A sword or even a spear. Or perhaps simply a blow.” The warmth of Hannibal’s touch was familiar, professional yet infinitely gentle. For a moment, Dr. Lecter raised his own arm to demonstrate the direction of force that the youth fended off. Will, on his knees, was gladly in thrall.

“I read the case studies you sent me,” Will said in Hannibal’s office afterward, desperate to fill the silence as the tea steeped and still trying to shake the feeling of that afternoon’s session. “Fascinating, the snake delusions.” He did not wish to think too hard about whether he had invited himself up to Dr. Lecter’s office simply to prove a point.

Hannibal made a noncommittal noise, his eyes trained on the scalloped knife as he cleaned it carefully.

Will tried again. “Do classics scholars go in for cultural theories? Or...that’s what we call it in psychology. Cultural psychopathology. Like you say you’re attacked by a spirit—or infested by snakes, I suppose—because that’s culturally acceptable and understood by your peers. Especially in the premodern world. It could be mental illness...or it could simply be extremes of emotion.”

Finally he looked up. “Your inner demons,” Hannibal said.

Will nodded. “If Laocoön believed a god sent snakes to kill him—”

“Ah, so you were listening. You think it was a hallucination?”

“No, I—well...” Will felt the thread of the conversation slipping away from him and grasped for his initial point. “I mean yes, I was...I started listening. But I don’t think he was mad. I mean, not mentally ill.” 

It was true that Will listened a lot now, waiting for Hannibal’s touch in class, or those quieter words meant for Will’s ears alone, sometimes. Inner quiet was no longer his goal. “The more I looked at his face, the more I saw...an inner torment. Like guilt.”

“Perhaps,” mused Hannibal, pouring tea into the cups before them. “But the Greeks had no concept of guilt. Hubris, certainly. But madness, well...” The professor’s eyes, hooded and keen with speculation, flitted over Will’s face again. “They were very fond of madness. Lyssa was the goddess of madness and frenzy. The wolf’s fury, they called her.” He stopped to savor the tea for a long moment. “When the gods cursed Herakles, they sent Lyssa. ‘Send forth frenzy upon this man’,” Hannibal quoted, looking out the window at bare sycamore branches as if issuing the command himself, waiting to see it carried out on the sidewalks below. “‘Confound his mind even to the slaying of his own children. Drive him, goad him wildly...shake out the very sails of death.’”

Will flashed again to the drawing session earlier, on his knees. The youth fending off death by the arrows of the gods. Hannibal stood above him in those long minutes, hours; he remembered with flashing hot clarity Hannibal’s exacting reconstruction of how Ilioneus was struck down, the physicality of how he would have resisted. Each muscle and bone and ligament of the statue laid bare in the professor’s description.  _ Hold still _ , he said to Will in between breaths, demonstrating the gods poised to strike.

“Maenads,” Will said dumbly, his empty teacup tipping in his hand, forgotten, his fingers curling only loosely around it. He stirred, trying to explain. “Ilioneus. It wasn’t arrows. It was a mob.”

A shifting current in Dr. Lecter’s expression. Curiosity surfaced, a dark shape among other unseen things. “You think he was caught in a Dionysian rite,” Hannibal said. 

Will was silent for a long moment. In thrall.

“No,” Hannibal corrected himself softly. “No, you imagine it.” 

The bones of Will’s knees creaked, resisting for a moment when he tried to shift in his chair to look away.

“That’s enough for today, I think,” Hannibal said, setting his teacup down.

“What?”

“This isn’t a distraction any longer, is it,” said Hannibal. A mild concern moving the corners of his handsomely formed mouth. “You’re getting too close to your material, perhaps.”

Will laughed, a short and nervous sound. “No, I’m just...thinking. It isn’t...I need this. The work, I mean.” He tripped over his own tongue trying to correct his words. It sounded completely wrong, inadequate to what it actually meant to him. A job? A distraction? It was no longer a conversation, a chance to quiet his mind. Every session in the drawing studio was a string of moments where he awaited Hannibal’s exquisite attention and could neither acknowledge what he wanted nor ask for more. “I’m exactly as close as I need to be.”

The ghost of a smile crossed Hannibal’s face. “Yes.” Hannibal sat perfectly at ease, regarding him; and, Will realized, now waiting for him to leave. Tension and need crawled across Will’s skin. The thread of psychosis, of madness bound together with desire, that wound through every sculpture Hannibal presented, every conversation between himself and Hannibal, seemed as bright as day, and as obvious. Yet Will doubted himself. 

He could say none of it out loud. Their conversations were no longer an escape, but rather a deeper dive into some unknown place, and Hannibal’s demeanor was a surface smooth as glass, betraying no trace of what lay beneath. The only sure thing was how Will felt under Hannibal’s touch during those few hours he was allowed each week. All else was fog, doubt, mistrustful shadows.

“Until next week?” Hannibal said. He stood and reached out his hand and for a confusing moment, Will thought he meant to hold hands, until Hannibal stepped closer to take the teacup out of Will’s loose grasp. It was a gentle motion, cupping the antique Japanese cup to carefully remove, cradle it in his palm. The touch lingered, unless it did not, and it was not enough, unless it was too much. 

Apology and plea, frenzy and delusion warred on the tip of his tongue. “Hannibal, I--” Will stopped, swallowed. He looked up, lost. 

Hannibal’s expression was distant yet not unkind. He held up the teacup, gesturing with it. “Don’t take the wolf’s frenzy with you, Will. I wouldn’t want to lose the department’s best model.”

 

* * *

 


	5. The Sleeping Aphrodite

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> First you see one thing, then you see another.

_ Opos stroseis tha koimetheis _ (How you make your bed is how you sleep)

-Greek proverb

 

* * *

 

A fifth of whiskey sloshing in his bag, Will pedaled his bicycle furiously to make it up the hill to Alana’s street. It was unseasonably warm, and it was Thursday. No tea with Hannibal today. 

Before class, Abigail had come up to him. “I saw Alana. She wanted me to give you this.” A neatly folded note in Alana’s neat, angular handwriting:  _ Here’s my new mobile number. Text me asap, we need to talk about Margot.  _

Outside the Classics building, worried about Alana but hoping Dr. Lecter might pass by, Will had texted Alana a quick hello and passed along the message from Chilton. After a moment’s consideration, he offered to bring over some wine if she wanted to talk.

Her message came back after a few minutes.  _ We’ll need something a lot stronger than wine. Come tonight, any time after 7.  _ Hannibal never emerged from the building and Will decided whiskey might be a better distraction in the end, and headed to the bottle shop. 

He locked up his bike and rang the bell to her flat, glancing up and down the empty street lit by the sickly orange glow of street lamps. All day it had been nearly too warm for a jacket, and heat radiated up from the bricks of the walkway, the fallen leaves all crisp and dusty. Alana had moved to a rather anonymous part of town, far from the colleges, an area with little traffic and even less charm, but it was part of a development that was patrolled by a private security team. That was its chief attraction for her, when she moved.

When Alana opened the door to let him in, she gathered him into a fierce hug, squeezing out a surprised, “Hello….missed you, too,” from him. Alana’s dark hair fell in loose waves around them and he was surprised at how good it felt to breathe in her familiar scent of citrusy hand creme and the faint hint of her last cigarette. 

Alana stepped back smiling and holding his shoulders. “How have you been, Will? I’ve been worried. I have to tell you—”

“Hi, Will.” Surprised, he turned to see Margot Verger in the doorway, staring at them.

He stared openly between her and Alana, until Alana closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead tiredly. “She’s just crashing here for a little while. Things are...complicated.”

Margot’s presence was not the only thing that caught him by surprise. He remembered her honey-colored hair, her usual tall elegance, but in place of the laughing wit or even the heartbroken girl from September, he now saw a gaunt figure with hollows under her eyes, pulling together the edges of her cardigan as if to hide herself from view. Margot disappeared back into the living room and after a strained moment, Will and Alana followed.

Will wordlessly passed Alana the whiskey from his bag and stood awkwardly to the side of the messy room while she rummaged in a cardboard box for glasses and sat down on the couch. The couch was an oasis of calm in the dim lounge—moving boxes were stacked in haphazard piles and a suitcase lay half-unpacked to one side. 

“Did I tell you Chilton hooked me up with some great research connections at NIMH while I was in Maryland? Killer schedule, but it was fantastic...” Alana started in, pouring the whiskey and sketching the outlines of her research trip to Johns Hopkins. Will settled next to Alana. Margot reached for her drink and perched uneasily on the arm of the couch furthest from them, not adding a word, turning her glass around and around in her hand. 

“...anyway, I’m just so glad to be back. So what’s new with you, Will?” 

He raised his eyebrows at Alana in exasperation.

“Okay, fine. Listen, what exactly did Chilton say to you?” Alana asked. Margot slid a  sidelong glance at Alana.

“About the guy who called looking for you? Nothing. Help me out here, Alana...why would they be trying to get in touch with you? Can’t they just call Margot?”

Margot folded even smaller into herself on the couch, elbows perched narrowly near her knees and her face near obscured by the cuffs of her sweater pulled up over her hands. She bit the corner of one nail and simply looked at Alana.

“The Vergers think I know where Margot is. Which I do,” Alana said, her lips thin, “but I’m not going to tell them anything. And they want Margot because they think she knows where her brother is.” 

At this, Margot abruptly stood up, a jerky, bird-like bundle of nerves, and poured herself a double and stalked off toward the kitchen. Ice rattled noisily in the sink as she loosened it from a tray. Alana leaned closer to Will. “Have there been any…” her eyes flickered to the kitchen momentarily and her voice dropped to a lower tone, “searches? Any gossip about it?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Mason. Her brother.” At Will’s blank look, Alana sighed. “He’s been...gone since October. Supposedly he’s abroad. But no one has heard from him.” 

Will remembered Mason from a few of Alana’s parties. They were uneasy memories. Mason entering the room like an animal one step removed from feral, feigning calm for some ulterior motive.  _ Mason, Margot didn’t ask you to come. _ Charming his way in at the tail end of a party, claiming his sister needed him.  _ I just want to talk to her.  _ Eyes ceaselessly hunting the flat from beneath a shock of hair the same honey-dark color as Margot’s.  _ Margot’s up on the roof for a smoke.  _ Always finding the most vulnerable person in the room and homing in on them.  _ Leave the kid alone, Mason. _

What was intriguing in Margot turned too slick when plied by Mason: standing too close, saying too much of what was on his mind, smiling like he knew everything about you. His smile a weapon when he found the person he was looking for.

“So...she doesn’t know where he is?” Will said in an undertone.

“I’m not even sure. She says—”

“I can hear you, you know,” Margot interrupted in a tired voice, looking at them over the kitchen counter. She leaned her elbows down on the laminate and toyed with a lighter, flipping it end over end against her palm. 

“Good. So answer Will’s question, then,” Alana said louder, frustration laid bare. “Do you know where he is or not?”

Silence from the kitchen.

Alana rolled her eyes. “All I know is that the police won’t file a missing persons report because he’s an adult, and he’s not in danger. He emailed a few friends saying he was planning to drop out, go get drunk on a beach in Cambodia or someplace for the winter. He took all his money out in traveler’s checks. His friends say he was planning to go back into modeling. He was sick of Cambridge, ranting about some professor.”

“You know him,” Margot said, coming close to the couch and looking intensely at Will, a kind of desperation in her eyes.

“Your brother?”

“No. Professor Lecter. Mason modeled for him, just like you, before he—before Abigail...” Margot stopped, tried again. “Abigail...knew Mason,” she muttered.

Taken aback, Will tried to picture louche Mason, playboy and Verger fortune heir, posing for Hannibal, and failed.  _ His talents lay elsewhere _ , Hannibal’s voice echoed in his head.

In the strained silence, Alana shot Margot a confused look and added, “It’s more than that, though, right? Before he...left, Mason was seeing Abigail.” 

Margot let out in a harsh, disgusted breath. “Is that what you think?” she gritted out, her lips in a thin line. “I don’t know exactly what she told Professor Lecter before that dinner, but they weren’t  _ dating _ .” She spat out the word like a curse.

“Dinner?” Will echoed. “What dinner?”

_ You should come over. Cooking is a passion of mine.  _

Margot’s look bordered on nausea. “He invited Abigail over for dinner. I drove her there. I think he knew—he already had four place settings laid out. He knew, somehow. How did he know?” Her eyes, rimmed with red, bored into Will and her voice pitched higher with a desperate mania, too many words spilling out. “Four plates. Four. He knew. He knew Mason would follow me eventually. And of course he did. He always did.” Her eyes flickered back and forth, examining something they could not see. “Or at least...I think he did. I thought he did.” She bit again at the bloodied cuticle of her nail, lapsing into a muttering silence.

“Margot, what the fuck? Either he was there, or he wasn’t,” Alana exploded. “Your parents are going to send that stupid private investigator here soon, you know they will. What do you want me to say? Are you going to hide out here forever?” Alana paced and turned on Margot with frustration pulling every line of her body tight. “Please tell me. Do I lie? Yes, Mr. Investigator, please tell the Vergers that I tried to take out a protective order against your daughter a month ago because she wouldn’t stop getting shitfaced drunk and stalking me, begging me to break up with her, and right now she’s definitely  _ not  _ camped out in my guest room with nowhere to go because she’s broke and her parents have frozen her accounts until she tells them what she knows, and I definitely haven’t heard pieces of this fucked-up story about a dinner party where may or may not have been the last one to see Mason the night before he left town with five thousand pounds—”

“He didn’t,” Margot spat out. “He doesn’t have the money, okay?” Margot ran her hands through her hair and leaned forward in her seat toward Alana, equal parts beseeching and apologetic. “I took the money. He—right before he disappeared I made him give me signatory power on the account. My parents don’t know.” Alana stared at Margot, who cowered, hedging her words. “I didn’t mean to let you think I was broke. It just seemed easier if—I wanted to stay here because I thought you would understand, and if he’s gone...Alana, you have to believe me.”

Alana nodded, though her eyes were elsewhere, blank. She would not meet Margot’s pleading look. Alana took a long sip, draining her whiskey, and poured another drink.

“So the money is beside the point,” Will said after a while. “Just make an anonymous call, report him as missing.”

“No,” whispered Margot. Her silence hung in the air.

After a moment, Alana walked forward and poured her ex-girlfriend a double, a triple, more, draining the entire rest of the bottle into Margot’s glass, nearly all the way up to the rim. “Why?” she said forcefully. Margot did not move or utter a word.

Alana got down on the floor and clutched Margot’s knees so she could look up into her stricken, downturned face, searching. She reached up and tucked a lock of dirty blond hair behind Margot’s ear and in a much softer, pleading voice, she repeated, “Why?”

Margot began to speak, unspooling the thread of the story with each sip she swallowed, uncertain as a child’s knitting, gapped and unraveling at every turn.

  
  


Mason, for all his good looks, his followers and hangers-on, liked to shadow Margot, show up unexpectedly when she was out with her friends in public places where she could not put him off without looking like a jerk, a shrew, a spoilsport. He liked to charm people just to spite Margot, to prove her wrong.

He also controlled their money, control he wielded like a leash. Margot, for her part, avoided their lavishly appointed flat as much as possible.

Mason liked to go too far when he partied, which was often, but he had enough money that the right people didn’t care, and the wrong people followed him everywhere to snatch up the scraps.

Mason liked his girlfriends young. He had found in Abigail someone starstruck by his image and young enough—in her first term at university, just eighteen—that she discounted his jealousy, the sharp grinning pressure of his attention, as part of his charm. She would not listen to Margot, who begged her to keep her distance, at first sweetly, then in futile attempts. 

Posing for Dr. Lecter’s class had been Mason’s idea, following Abigail; he traded on his catalogue model looks to get the job. From the first day, he took unannounced breaks, to Dr. Lecter’s mounting annoyance; Mason would sling a robe loosely around his shoulders and pace around the room, always intent on Abigail. Lecter even dismissed one session early, his voice barely civil, when Mason kept turning to look straight at Abigail and whisper filthy things.  _ Be a good girl and you’ll get to do more than look.  _

Some of it Margot guessed; some of it she heard only much later, when it was too late.

Professor Lecter, pushed within an inch of losing patience every week, grew harsher, stricter with the class. He assigned Abigail to the easel farthest from the center platform and imposed strict penalties for interruptions. Mason strolled the aisle while Dr. Lecter watched with cold disdain, but no student would look at him, respond to his vulgar comments, his insults. Abigail alone had to bear the consequences of it later.

The stricter Lecter became, the more Mason wanted from Abigail afterward. He took her driving in his Mercedes and when adrenaline pounded together with arousal in her veins, like a car swinging too fast around a blind curve, wasn’t that love, too? Even when Mason left bruises, even when he didn’t listen, even when his intensity shaded into a rough, violent carnality that left her shaken.

One day, Abigail wore a scarf looped high around her neck to cover the bruises, red-purple and sickly green-blue in long, constricting lines where his fingers had been. 

Something else was different that day, too. Professor Lecter did not bother to correct Mason’s sloppy imitation of the faun sculpture they studied. Mason’s sneer, his spread legs, his entire form a threat. Abigail’s pencil remained poised over her sketchpad a full three hours without moving: prey gone limp in the jaws of a predator. Dr. Lecter fired Mason that day too, serene and unbothered by the reddened flush of anger creeping up Mason’s neck when half the class heard. 

Mason dragged Abigail with him back to his flat.  _ You’re to blame for this, aren’t you? Bullshit you didn’t tell him. Can’t keep that pretty whore mouth closed, can you?  _ When she flinched, he ripped her scarf down, pawing at the skin.  _ What other lies have you been spreading? _

Margot was there. She shoved the terrified girl behind her, told him to let Abigail leave. 

_ She’s a liar, Margot _ ,  _ she only wants attention.  _

_ I’ll tell father. I’ll tell the police what you did.  _

_ You wouldn’t dare.  _

In the midst of the fight, Abigail’s mobile phone rang.  _ It’s Professor Lecter,  _ she whispered _.  _

Margot recognized a trump card when she saw one.  _ Answer it. _

_ Don’t you fucking dare— _

_ Yes, professor, everything is fine.  _ The girl’s voice shook like a leaf. Margot took advantage of the moment to hand Mason the paperwork she had been trying to get him to sign for weeks, granting her signatory power on the bank account. Whispered to him,  _ I’ll put the call on speaker if you don’t sign.  _ He signed furiously while Abigail struggled to control her voice. 

_ No sir, I mean yes, but he’s just leaving.  _ The tires of Mason’s car squealing in the street as he peeled out.

_ Dinner? Sure. Margot, can you drive me? _

_ Wine worthy of Dionysus _ , he called it, poured ruby-dark into four crystal glasses. Four slices of something rich and red and roasted until sweet, served on exquisite china.

He had seen Margot’s car in the driveway and immediately invited her in.  _ I always set an extra place for the unexpected guest _ , he said, never explaining the fourth place setting.

There was more wine after dinner, she was almost certain. Was it the same wine? Dense and mineral velvet, a velvet fishhook against her tongue. 

After three courses, the wine made Margot’s head swim; the house around her glowing with traces of candlelight, sound flickering everywhere in giddy echoes. She remembered Abigail telling Professor Lecter a long story; it made Margot antsy, she could not manage to listen. The wine stole her attention span; she got up to refill her glass. 

When she returned, Abigail lay sprawled comfortably on the Persian rug, eyes wide and pupils pin-prick narrow, staring at the ceiling. Dr. Lecter asked Margot a question and for the life of her, she could not manage to think of the answer.

In that silence, the unmistakable purr of Mason’s car idling to a stop in the driveway and his knock hammering at the door, at her blood. Fear in her throat, thick and choking. His hiss in her ear,  _ Maybe you don’t care what lies you spread, so long as someone licks your sweet cunt when you spread your legs.  _ A sound, then. From no one’s throat. From everywhere. The answer to Dr. Lecter’s question, perhaps.

Or there was nothing. The room still and empty, just Abigail rising to her feet and the glass doors to the garden swinging open before them. The delicious smell of the autumn woods calling her.

Margot had heard Lecter’s front door open. She swore she did.

But Mason never came inside at all, did he? Because his wine and his food went untouched, and Lecter looked sad about the waste of it. 

Or Mason did come inside, because his plate lay emptied, askew on the tablecloth, and Abigail’s eyes brimmed with the same heady mix of confused abandon in Margot’s veins. Dr. Lecter was nowhere to be found and Margot’s arms were sore all over.

But that was after. Wasn’t it?

The glass doors to the garden stood open. An infinity of flaring stars waiting outside. Margot and Abigail walked out into the night—or were they running? Collapsing against each other in the warm early autumn night, feet catching in tangled vines. Laughing, breath gone ragged—no, not laughter, a howling. A baying, like hounds in pursuit, hand in hand with Abigail. 

_ Drink. _ The taste of wine so full in her mouth it was like drinking from a stream, a spring that poured into her, through her. 

Hungry for something more.

Abigail’s eyes gone wide, all pupil now in the dark. Each step stalking, quiet. Margot’s elation when they hear it: an animal bellow of pain in the dark.

The feel of bone breaking, what rips around it, what soft sounds hide in the vertebrae. The feel of pulling until her own arms want to break, except they don’t. Something else does.

Margot conscious only of a maddening sound, grating and fine-toothed, and a wild helpless feeling inside her. Hunger. A glee bubbling in her, far beyond ecstasy. Abigail draped across her and singing. Wine, too, sweet and spilling over her chin and Abigail’s as they laugh. Shaking. Sated.

They awoke on Hannibal’s couch, tucked under a soft quilt, clean and sobering morning light over everything. It had been a fever dream, a hallucination. Margot went to the bathroom and vomited until she was finally emptied, until something dark and grainy as coffee grounds came up. 

Hungover, they found Dr. Lecter in the kitchen. Abigail asked,  _ What happened? _

_ You found something last night.  _

He took them out to the woods behind the house where the stag lay, blood soaking into brown leaf litter. The stag’s neck, an open red gash, swarmed with flies. Fresh, hacking cuts down the abdomen, the edges of cut skin clotted with hair and puckered, drying out.  _ Scavengers already took all the entrails _ , he said, breath fogging the air. 

With one foot he nudged the stag’s foreleg. They saw it had an old injury there, rotted through the flesh and blackened down to the shocking white of the bone and twist of sinew.  _ Was it dead when you found it? _

Then he picked up a familiar looking knife that lay discarded in the leaves, little clumps of hair clinging to the drying blood.  _ Taking my silver out to the woods, I see _ .  _ You must have taken it with you after dinner. _ He was kind, sympathetic. Amused.  _ Perhaps you helped the poor beast.  _ Not a trace of judgment.  _ It was a mercy. _

It had been a long, dark night. A strong wine. 

He said they had returned from their walk in the woods after some time, asking to use the shower for the stag’s blood. They had fallen asleep on the couch while he washed up after dinner. 

He said he waited up, and Mason never came.  _ I thought it better to let you both rest. You looked so peaceful.  _

Margot sat folded into herself in the corner of the couch, an origami of sallow, sharp curves. Her whiskey glass caught and splintered a pale green light from the kitchen fluorescents. “I took the money out later. I didn’t know he had emailed his friends—after a few days one of his stupid friends came around looking to buy some pills, wanting Mason’s new mobile number. I told him I didn’t have it, hadn’t heard from him. He asked me if he was already in Cambodia, if Mason meant what he said in his message, that he didn’t plan to come back to Cambridge at all.” She swallowed the last drop of her drink, tilting her head back far enough to expose the fragile lines of her throat. “That’s when my parents started calling.” 

“You don’t really think...” Alana’s eyes filled with concern and disbelieving shock, “Margot, they can’t...they wouldn’t blame you, would they?”

“Because I didn’t do anything?” Margot said too loudly, her voice as sharply hysterical as her eyes. Unshed tears trembled there. “Or because I did?”

“But what do you think you did? Or Abigail did? Lecter showed you the stag, what else could have possibly—”

“Alana,” Will said in warning. He could see the tension in Margot like a strand of thread ready to break, Margot wiping angrily at her eyes with the back of her sleeve. “Maybe he wanted to protect you,” Will stopped, filled with doubt. “To protect Abigail, maybe.” 

Alana stepped closer, leaning over Margot in concern. “Why not just tell you the truth? If something really happened, which I doubt...why not just ring the police?”

“It’s not a crime to cut open a dead animal,” Will said quietly. Not saying what he pictured. Above all things, Hannibal was mannered, cultured, utterly private.

He imagined Hannibal looking on as it happened. The youth cut down in a dark wood by the Maenads, by Fury herself. 

Alana tried to wrest Margot out of her fugue-like state, pulling one of Margot’s hands out of her lap to clasp it. “What are you going to do?”

“Nothing.”

“Why don’t you just ask Dr. Lecter what really happened?”

“I don’t want to know what happened!” Margot ripped her hand back and seemed shocked by her own vehemence. “What’s the point? Mason is—he was a sick man. What he did...there were so many other girls before Abigail, you have no idea,” Margot closed her eyes briefly. “I just want...a little quiet. I don’t care if I never know what happened that night. I don’t care if my fucking parents cut me off. Maybe he’ll turn up like a bad penny and this will turn out to be another stupid trick he’s playing on me and I’ll be the idiot who fell for it and everything will go back to normal except ten times worse.” Her voice broke on a sob and she pulled her hand into one sleeve and held it over her mouth, muting the sound.

There were things Alana knew, Will saw, that went beyond what Margot had been able to speak of that day. He saw it in the stricken line of worry that settled on Alana’s brow as she wrapped Margot in a tight embrace and rocked her slowly, soothing her with a quiet hush in her ear.

Will felt the small white business card burning a hole in his pocket. That very afternoon Hannibal had handed it to him before class. Just before Abigail had approached him. 

It had been a long session contorted into the pose of the Sleeping Aphrodite.  _ A trick played on the viewer _ , Hannibal had called it.  _ You see one thing, you see another. _

_ My address. You should come to dinner tonight.  _ Every second he had spent under Hannibal’s hands had been leading to this, and now a bright bubble of certainty strained to burst from under his skin. 

“I have to go,” Will said, agitated, plucking his jacket up from the floor.

“You’re going to go see him, aren’t you,” Margot accused him. Her eyes followed him, sickly certain. “Don’t say anything. You can’t.”

“Will—” Alana sputtered a reply, but he didn’t give her time. The moment hung poised on a razor-thin pivot. 

“No, I—you don’t have to worry,” was all he managed to say as he fled through the door. Even as he spoke, he was uncertain why he said those words and knew they rang unconvincingly. The front door slammed behind him on his way out into the cool night.

  
  


All he could think, pedaling his bicycle, was that Hannibal  _ knew _ . The air held a chill now that night had fallen across Cambridge, and despite his muscles working at a furious pace down the bicycle path, his lungs burned with the cold. Hannibal knew what Will knew, or what he would come to know, before Will himself had even heard it from Margot’s lips.

Before class began he had given Will that cream-colored card with engraved gold letters. “Here. My address,” he had said. “Just in case.”

An invitation. Like slipping over the edge of an underwater cliff, sudden and invisible and vast. “Just in case what?” Will managed to ask. Abigail was already signaling Will from across the room. Hannibal saw it, too, as he spoke quietly, unhurried.

“In case you need to find me. You should come to dinner sometime, Will. Cooking is one of my passions,” he said. Abigail remained stuck behind a knot of people at the doorway, trying to wave to Will. “I enjoy cooking for my friends.”

“Are we friends, Dr. Lecter?” His heart beat madly.

He tutted. “So formal. Don’t you want to be friends, Will?” In the elegant turn of his head, a thousand things waited, unspoken and not quite visible, in those hooded eyes. “You are not my student. Not my...employee.”

“No.” Will’s breath gone shallow. “Just your model.” A small, surprised smile broke upon Hannibal’s face before he turned away and Abigail finally reached Will’s side to pass along Alana’s note. Hannibal would not meet his eyes after that.

  
  


Will had spent the session that afternoon lying down in an uncomfortable twist, the pose of the Sleeping Aphrodite. His neck ached in the position, head pillowed on his arms facing one direction, his torso facing another, his spine turned yet further still. Nearly impossible. 

“This sculpture belongs to a genre of great interest in the Hellenistic period. It is a trick on the viewer, a playful transgression. A signal of cultured refinement and jest. You see one thing, then you see another. The beauty of Aphrodite is seen along the long exposed flank from one side,” he said, gesturing to Will’s back, dampening with sweat under the strain of the pose and the warmth of the room, “then a surprise is revealed on the other side -- it is not the mons of Aphrodite but Hermaphroditus’ genitalia.”

To get the pose correct, Hannibal had adjusted Will’s elbows and his hand lingered on the back of Will’s head, a pressure that would have been almost painful if he had not wanted to be touched so badly just then. 

  
  


“A model who wants to be...friends,” Hannibal said carefully just after class when Will had emerged from the adjoining room, dressed once more. “Is that what you want, Will?”

The pause between them crackling with what went unsaid. Will thought he was imagining the tilt of Hannibal’s body toward him until the professor reached out and took the ends of Will’s scarf in his hands. He settled the scarf evenly and snug between Will’s coat collar and the skin of his neck with a simple familiarity and a gentleness that left Will nearly breathless.

It was like the pressure of Hannibal’s hand on the back of his skull that afternoon, pressing and pressing, until the pulse of Will’s neck went dull against the weave of the pillow. Not a single student was positioned to see what Hannibal saw at that moment: how Will responded. How afterward he left a shining mark on the soft sheet where the weeping tip of his hard cock lay pressed for so long. Will had had to steel himself before he rose, stretching to buy time. He finally stood up dizzy and aching. 

Then Hannibal let go of Will’s scarf, looked at him with utter calm, and said, “Let me know when you decide. You know where to find me.”

  
  


Hannibal knew. Will was sure of it.

He leaned into the wind and pedaled faster.

 


	6. The Barberini Faun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Is that what you want, Will?

* * *

 

 

“Hello, Will. Come in.”

Hannibal did not speak to Will’s breathless, slightly wild-eyed demeanor and led him to the kitchen. His long white apron was as pristine as his oxford button-down and he took up a knife, chopping fragrant herbs on a large cutting board next to a hot pan.

“I’m so glad you came,” he said. With the tip of his long knife, he slid a knob of butter into a hot pan, where it dissolved into a fragrant puddle and began to sizzle loudly. “It’s almost ready.”

“Are you expecting a guest? I’m sorry—”

“No.”

Will looked at the two plates, exquisitely arranged and awaiting some final touch. In the center of each one, a broad swath of empty china waited for whatever was about to be seared in butter and herbs. “You were expecting me, then.”

Hannibal peeled back a damp towel from a tray of thinly sliced raw meat and began sliding the pieces one by one into the hot pan with his fingertips. “Would it upset you if I said yes?” He merely glanced up once as he continued working. The quickly finished slices, fried and fragrant and still sizzling, waited on a long, narrow platter as he slid the remainder into the pan.

With a small sigh, Will took off his jacket and ran a hand through his sweat-dampened curls, dropping his satchel onto the floor.

“Make yourself useful and open that bottle of wine for me, would you?” Hannibal nodded at the side counter.

Will found not a single word to save him from this impossible situation. Hello, thanks for dinner, did you cover up a murder? As he spiraled the corkscrew into the bottle, he knew it was fantastically impossible.

He needed Hannibal to deny it. Yet he remained silent. He wanted to be what Hannibal made him when he posed: possessed and pliant. He wanted Hannibal exactly like that, something he could not ask for, only be given.

Something Abigail could not ask for, only be given.

As he watched, Hannibal slid the last slice out of the sizzling pan. He turned to take the bottle of wine from Will’s hands and they were mere inches apart. Hannibal tipped his head to one side, looking at him.  _ Is that what you want, Will? _

“Will. The wine?”

“Here,” he managed to stammer, passing it over too quickly. It would have sloshed out of the bottle had Hannibal not firmly stoppered the top with his thumb, breaking eye contact with Will in order to pour some into the pan.

In the pan, the wine hissed and then roared into flame when Hannibal tipped it sideways into the blue gas. Will felt the heat against his skin like a brand.

“It won’t be long now,” Hannibal said. He indicated the dining room table.

The fragrance of browned butter and burgundy filled Will’s nostrils as he retreated, trying to cover the heat and confusion surging equally together in his blood. 

Hannibal served the finished plates with an understated flourish. “Kidney butter-fried in sage with a burgundy herb reduction, with curried parsnip puree and mizuna.” The plates Hannibal set down before them revealed colors like the autumn woods, crisp greens setting off darker red and orange. Six pomegranate seeds glinted atop the curried parsnip, precise as jewels, leaving tiny wine-dark traces in the puree.

In the dark gray dining room, the light spilled across Hannibal’s features, making of his smooth skin a place of angle and shadow. He raised a toast to Will, who looked up from the art before him in undisguised astonishment.

“To friends. Expected and unexpected,” Hannibal amended with a nod.

Will raised his glass uneasily, trying to keep a steady head. “To friends.” His hand shook only a little when he took the smallest of sips. When he had tasted the dish, he only grew more astonished. “Fried kidneys are so British...but I’ve never tasted them so good.”

Hannibal cut his food continental style, the tines of his fork upside-down and precise. “I rarely cook kidney. Except for special occasions.” He savored another bite. “Cooking is a rare art -- when you do it right, there is nothing left afterward. Nothing like a sculpture.” He glanced at Will. “Perhaps more like a model.”

Will clenched a hand in his lap, pinned by the spotlight of Hannibal’s gaze, Hannibal’s knowledge of what was between them. Hannibal’s control. The thread of separation between psychosis and myth, between fiction and fact, control and abandon, had snapped in some critical moment and Will had not seen it happen. There was Margot, folded into herself with fear; there she was clean and dry in the morning, the stag’s blood clotting among the leaves. 

Locked in his own thoughts, he did not see the bitter pu-ehr granita being served for dessert until Hannibal set it before him. He ladled a ruby-colored syrup on top, and it melted the granita in little channels, running to the edge of the dish darker red, then nearly black with the melting ice granules of tea. “The scent of it is quite lovely when it melts,” Hannibal said, unexpectedly close, leaning in. Will obediently took a breath of the bittersweet liqueur and balsam of the dish as well as the unmistakable scent of Hannibal himself. So close he could almost grasp something important there, in between the cracks of what he had been allowed to glimpse. The smoothness of Hannibal that beckoned, the confusion he found whenever he stepped too close.

_ Is that what you want, Will? _

“Will?”

Will looked up, lost. “The faun...”

For a fleeting moment, Hannibal stilled. “They were not venison kidneys, if that’s what you’re asking, Will.” His gaze was untroubled and he bent to taste a silver spoonful of the granita.

“The sleeping faun.”

“Ah. The Barberini Faun.” He favored Will with a brief, wistful gaze as he stood to clear the shallow dessert bowls. “It’s a pity you weren’t my model the whole term. You would have made an excellent Barberini Faun.” Will was filled with the unsettling picture of Mason’s smooth face, posed as the faun: eyes closed in sleep, or something like it.

He stood up abruptly from his chair and crossed the room, trying to order his thoughts before he was overwhelmed. There was no cleverness left in him. Only the crisp, bright cacophony of what Hannibal had given him. “What happened to him?”

Hannibal walked toward him slowly, eyes steady as ever. “That’s not what you came here to ask me tonight, Will.”

“It’s not?” Will laughed, desperate and short of breath as Hannibal came closer still, close enough to crowd Will back until his back knocked against the wall.

“Think. What’s the question you came here to ask?”

Will felt it spill over him, a wave of furious confusion, Margot’s story and every unknowable part of it.  _ You see one thing.  _ Not psychosis. Frenzy. “You...you made them do it somehow. It wasn’t a stag.”  _ Then you see another. _

“Alcohol can play tricks on the memory, Will.”

“Did they...did you—”

Hannibal followed Will’s wild, darting eyes, with his face, so close as if to corral his words, too. “You know what I am. Ask me.”

“I don’t understand.  _ Why _ , Hannibal…”

“No,” said Hannibal, warning. “Not why.” He placed his hand on Will’s shoulder, holding him still, his fingers sinking into the muscle and the flesh of Will’s neck. It was painful, it was grounding. 

_ Is that what you want, Will? _

He wanted to be what Hannibal made him. 

“How.” Will’s broken plea. “Tell me.” Hardly were the words out of his mouth when Hannibal closed the remaining inches between them and kissed him, open-mouthed and wet, devouring. Will almost sobbed with relief into Hannibal’s mouth, clutching a fistful of his shirt. Hannibal dragged him closer, smoothed a palm along his jaw that he followed with kisses, with teeth, up his neck and into his hair, arching Will back so that he sagged into Hannibal’s embrace. 

Hannibal bent to kiss the skin of Will’s neck, inhaling the scent of him, intoxicated, possessive. Will was achingly hard when Hannibal pressed his knee between Will’s legs and ground against him, on the edge of too much.

“There are some things the mind cannot hold onto,” Hannibal said into his ear, his voice gone darker, graveled with lust. He rested his cheek against Will’s for a moment, breathing the scent of his hair. Will turned and captured his mouth again in a bruising kiss, desperate to taste him again. The cold pomegranate liqueur lingered there. A deep moan echoed in Will’s chest when Hannibal’s palm stroked the front of his pants, slow and torturous.

“Frenzy and fury—” Hannibal broke off, a ghost of a gasp in his voice when Will could not stop himself from bucking his hips up into the pressure of his hand. Unmovable, he pressed Will back against the wall, holding him in place again where he wanted him, “—they take something in return.” He tipped his head back, denying Will a kiss as Will writhed, helpless to Hannibal’s touch. “Your friends—they knew the price. They knew what it was like to be driven by the wolf’s fury. To go  _ mad  _ with it.” 

Will’s knees nearly collapsed under him with the intensity of Hannibal’s touch and careful control. Hannibal pressed closer, his eyes passing across Will’s skin, keeping up the slow friction of his hand on Will’s cock. Hannibal shifted so his forearm pinned Will across the shoulders and crept up to press on the base of his throat. “They went to the woods because they needed something there. Something they could not give themselves,” he said, voice a dark press against Will’s senses. “Something they needed to be given. Something they could never ask for. I merely opened the door.”

“Yes,” Will gasped, clinging to him. The fleet dark pursuit in the woods and his own pounding pulse; he knew what that animal howl of need would have sounded like. The way any animal is an animal in the dark, human or not. 

The hunt. The capture. The pulling-apart. Alive.

The core of him coiling, pinned, on the knife’s edge of release as Hannibal stroked him and pressed closer, stars swimming in Will’s sight. 

“That kind of hunt is too delicate for the inexperienced,” Hannibal breathed into Will’s skin. “Someone has to hold the knife.”

A blade spilling liquid from a seam. Will gasped. A plea died on his lips, airless.

Hannibal leaned so close he barely had to breathe for his words to enter Will’s ear. “Someone has to drain the blood.”

_ Like a spring flowing into me _ , Margot had said. Soaked and sated with it. Wine-dark. Fit for Dionysus. 

_ Please God _ —that touch. Hannibal the priest at the altar. The artist. 

_ You see one thing, then you see another. _

The knife sawing at the flesh, the sweet wet secret of the body, carving for Margot, for Abigail. 

“Someone has to—let the innocent rest.”

Hannibal the hunter. Dragging a long-dead deer for hours through a dark wood. Not the body of a young man. That was long gone.  _ You know what I am. _

“Someone—has to—make the world—right.”

Will’s hands grasped at the empty air. He spilled, hot and wet, gasping against Hannibal, his breath coming back, a rush of black in his vision for just a moment, Hannibal easing back from his collarbones. Nerveless and weak, Will slid down the wall and landed in a tangle of his own limbs at Hannibal’s feet.

Hannibal looked down at him, breath quickened, eyes dark with desire. Quieted now, Will felt inside himself a hollowness where he had once thought a line had been drawn between himself and the outside world. His eyes blurred, wet, though he felt suffused only with a sick wonder. 

Dropping to one knee, Hannibal took out a pocket handkerchief to blot gently at Will’s cheeks. After the delicacy of this touch, Will was surprised when Hannibal wrapped his arms around Will, one arm under his knees and the other cradling his back like a child’s, and carried him to the couch in the next room.

Hannibal laid his head on a pillow, and tucked a blanket around him. He made to speak and Hannibal stopped him with a finger across his lips.

“I have to set some more things to right. In the kitchen, and elsewhere. You must rest.” 

Will did not remember falling asleep; he did not even remember closing his eyes.

 

 

A log popped and settled and a quiet sound moved against fine-grained paper: Will came awake gradually to find Hannibal sketching him from the chair opposite, in the low firelight that mixed with the first gray light of dawn coming in through the far windows. His sketchbook propped on one crossed knee, he was at work, as always, in a state of calm yet intense focus.

“Lie still,” Hannibal said with an affectionate half-smile, and Will tried to comply, letting his head sink fully into the cushions and trying not to ask the hundred questions on his tongue. He felt a dull ache behind his eyes from everything catching up with him, but the house was empty and silent around them like a shield, and he was content to let Hannibal draw as long as he wanted. It was nearly an hour before Hannibal stirred from his position, sweeping away eraser shavings as he stood up.

Will held the sketch pad in his hands gingerly when Hannibal passed it to him. It was the sleeping faun. The Dionysian satyr dreaming on its marble pedestal. Head of wild curls tipped back on one shoulder, one arm reaching lazily back, the faun lay sprawled in sleep, legs and arms open and nakedly erotic. The face was Will’s own, eyes shut in deepest vulnerable sleep, and he recognized the particular lines of his own body, down to every detail.

Hannibal had seen him, had always seen him, with so more care and attention.  _ That’s not the question you came here to ask.  _ And he let Will see exactly how Hannibal himself wished to be seen.  _ First you see one thing, then you see another.  _ The artist at work.

_ Someone has to make the world right.  _

Asleep, in the picture, Will saw only the innocence of it. Awake, he felt the darker pooling of desire and madness, the confusing night flirting with psychosis in him like a sickness. The blur of what was and what should be. What was possible. What was allowed.

He looked into Hannibal’s eyes and saw there a quiet readiness, waiting for Will to understand. The house was more than quiet, it was emptied out, cleaner than clean.

When Will understood, they walked to the door together and Hannibal carefully wrapped Will’s scarf around him, tucking the ends in so it would not fly away in the early morning autumn wind.

Hannibal lifted Will’s hand and turned it palm up. He kissed it right in the center, then folded Will’s fingers around it as if to trap the warmth there.

“I won’t see you again, will I,” Will said, holding his bicycle by the crossbar and shifting uneasily. Confusion swam in him, desperation and relief and despair. For what they had shared, for what he had seen, he would get to keep none of it.  _ If you do it right, there is nothing left behind.  _ If this loss moved Hannibal, he made no response. Behind him, through the doorway, Will glimpsed the dark maroon of a passport next to a leather valise.

It was a long bicycle ride home, the road winding through the dense woods, and it wasn’t until midway that he took a breath, swallowing the sobs that threatened to choke him. Coasting, he looked up to keep back the tears that threatened, and saw one morning star shine out among the clouded gray and white of dawn; a dying brightness in the growing day,  a small thing, but beautiful. Beautiful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just love a fic that takes me umpteen months to write and revise and doubt myself completely! Ha. 
> 
> I'd love a comment! Say hi over at tumblr, @ thatbluenote.


End file.
